Emeric and Savi trudge through the untamed wilds of Stel, beating the underbrush aside, their boots soaked through, chilling them to the bone. In the bluish moonlight, Savi’s white robes appeared to carry the hue of frost, her expression cold to match. Their experience with the dark mage Garth in Hollow’s Edge was still at the forefront of her mind, and the divine magics swirling inside of her began to boil over, her hands glowing with the radiance of the gods. Emeric turns, extending a hand to her, “I know your pain, Savi. The powers within us are not the evils he made them out to be, take my word for it. All power can be used for the benefit of others, regardless of its potential for destruction. Just as a flowing river may burst the dam and carry away whole towns, it is also a source of life for the region.” His words struck a chord with Savi, her eyes softening once more, recognizing the truth he spoke. Surely their magic was not being used for ill deeds in their hands, even if Zartek could twist and corrupt them.

As the pair continued beating their path through the underbrush, a shadowed figure flew past them, followed closely by two other forms, less shadows and more abyssal. The very light around them seemed to vanish, not gathered, not blocked, but destroyed. A chill flashed through the air around Emeric and Savi, their blood cooling into flowing knives in their veins. The figures continued ahead of them, nearly too quick for the eye to follow, and Savi turns to Emeric, a knowing look in her gaze. Surging through the underbrush, the pair used their magic to assist their travel. Emeric draws sigils in the air, dashing forwards using the force they propel to shoot himself forward. Savi’s radiant light flows forth once more, pressing aside the underbrush in front of her, paving the way for her lithe sprinting figure. Nearing a clearing in the shrubbery, the pair slink forwards, the chill in the air growing nearly unbearable once more. In the clearing, the abyssal forms swirl around an obscured, kneeling body. Their spiraling circle grows smaller and smaller, slowly closing in on the person in the clearing. And suddenly, as soon as they appeared back in the forest, the figures seemed to slam together and disappear, the moonlight vanishing for a moment as they escaped. With horror, Emeric and Savi realize who the figure in the clearing is. Garth, the powerful dark mage they couldn’t even hope to put a scratch on lay dead in the clearing, his eyes near-liquefied, dripping out of his skull like a despicable jelly. His limbs twisted around on themselves, his body laid out in the form of a sinister sigil, bones snapped and protruding like stakes, painting a picture of pure, unbridled evil. Wordless, Emeric holds back bile, hardly able to contain his disgust at the sight before them. Stepping cautiously into the clearing, the pair feel the chill lingering in the air from the malevolent shadows, their pure evil freezing even the air around them. Emeric tries to decipher what this sigil could be for, wordlessly pacing around the body, while Savi looks on in horror.

“Emeric… why… why and how could they do this, he was so powerful we would struggle to even follow his movements,” Savi began, her confusion and worry bleeding through, tainting her voice red. Emeric turns to her, looking over the body before them. “He may have been one of them… but he still yielded information to us. His superiors would not take kindly to that, certainly not after realizing who we are. We disrupted their plans in Brookhaven, they aren’t likely to forget that.”

“I agree… however twisted he may have been to us, he still wasn’t pure to those commanding him. I can’t help but fear for what will happen when we face them,” Her voice trails off, hitching, betraying her fear. Emeric moves to step over the corpse, to comfort Savi, but when he enters the bounds of the sigil made of Garth’s bone… his head snaps back. His arcane energy begins whirling around him, buffeting Savi with the force of a hurricane, her robes pulling taught behind her. Gritting her teeth, shoving aside her fear, her doubt, and all thoughts other than needing to save Emeric, she pushed into the gale, closer and closer to Emeric. Reaching him, she slowly extends her hand, stopping just short of the sigil bounds, hesitating, wondering what it would do to her as well. Looking back up at Emeric’s eyes, nearly consumed by the black shadows of his power, his expression twisted into a pain-filled grimace, she steels herself, and reaches inside the sigil. The world goes white, and fades to stillness once again.

* -

Hours later, as the first dawn’s light scraped the horizon, Emeric and Savi awoke in a daze, disoriented and uncertain as to what happened to them. Garth’s twisted corpse lay a few feet away in the clearing, but it was now… changed. His eyes, once liquefied, were now left as smoldering remains. His skin was charred, robes burned away as if by a great fire, though nothing else in the clearing was burned. Faint runic lines shimmered through the ash coating his body, too faint to make out what they were intended to do. Emeric bolted upright, something was amiss, something was wrong. “Savi, is anything different here,” he calls, frantically racing around the clearing, unable to shake a distinct sense of unease. “Emeric… I feel a great void inside me, as if a well of nothing sprung up in my very soul. I feel the gods… but they feel… changed.” Emeric turned to face Savi, concern heavy upon his mind. Savi gasped, seeing the change in Emeric. “Your eyes, they’re… golden?”

“That’s not possible, the arcane tinges all eyes black, a golden light is… unheard of.”

“I do not tell you a lie, Emeric. Your eyes are golden, swirling the same way, but the opposite color.” Savi reached out her hand, resting it on Emeric’s shoulder. “I believe I know what happened, my friend.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“What do you believe, Savi,” Emeric responds, his voice a mixture of defeat and fear. “What if… what if our exposure to the dark conjoined magic of Zartek’s minions has somehow created an effect on our magic? The sigil only fully reacted once we both were inside of it, as if it was only partially activated by detecting your arcane energies. When my divine energies broke the bounds of the sigil, we were both swallowed up by a brilliant light. Perhaps this inadvertently twisted the sources of our magic, if not the capability itself?” Wordlessly, Savi began intoning the chants of her gods, calling for the radiant light to guide their way… and from her fingertips, an inky black thread poured forth. Emeric and Savi stared at each other, wordless, unable to accept what happened to them. “Surely this is temporary, the gods are still divine, they cannot have taken that fact from the realm, we must be able to… break this entanglement,” Emeric says frantically, somehow more panicked than before. “We will do our best, my friend… but perhaps this is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. We must press onwards, no matter the difficulty and the change before us,” Savi’s voice echoes in the silence of the clearing, the truth of her words biting through the bitter fear Emeric felt, knowing the arcane power he had grown to expect to find inside himself was now changed, and the only people that may be able to reverse the change could be the very enemy they fought against. In that moment, a sudden pang of realization sliced through Emeric’s chest. The source of their newfound power had been the very sigil that had entwined and misaligned their magical energies. It was not a mere accident, a sudden entanglement, but rather a deliberate act by their foes. They had used the sigil’s power to twist and transform their very essence, leaving them entirely vulnerable to the dark forces they sought to vanquish. His heart heavy with despair, Emeric knew the new energies they felt was not their own, but Zartek’s perversion of the arcane and divine energies they once relied upon. They were no longer the champions of justice, but unknowing vessels of darkness. They had to find a way to purge themselves of this newfound corruption. With a hesitancy reserved for someone touching their worst fear, or confronting their most hated adversary, Emeric raised his hand, fingers trembling, and began tracing a sigil in the air. An inky black smoke, similar to the smoky figures racing through the woods, dripped from the lines hanging heavy in the air. As he completed the sigil, it began releasing more and more smoke, slowly spinning in the air, producing light as intended, but a light that struck an uneasy chord with the pair. It seemed both warm and cold at once, a light and darkness joined in one… Savi’s heart sank to her stomach, her fists clenching, seeing the corruption of her friend’s magic, and his disgust and fear seeing the effects on himself.

Her eyes flicked up, catching the slightest movement through the dense thicket surrounding them. “Emeric, above!” she cried out, her voice tinged with urgency. Without hesitation, Emeric shifted his stance, the dark sigil still pulsating in front of him. From the shadows of the tall, gnarled trees, a figure cloaked in robes darker than a starless night emerged. The figure’s face was obscured by a hood, and from beneath it glowed eyes that burned like coals smoldering in the deep. Savi recognized the malice emanating from this figure - the unmistakable mark of a dark mage of Zartek. The mage raised his hands, and tendrils of dark energy spiraled outwards, twisting and turning through the air towards them. Emeric, with a gritted jaw, pushed forward his own corrupted sigil which moved sluggishly as if struggling against an unseen mire. The black smoke clashed with the dark tendrils, creating a cacophony of hisses and sparks as shadow fought shadow. Savi, not hesitating, muttered an incantation under her breath. Her words seemed to falter on her lips as she wrestled internally with the perversion of her magic. Instead of the radiant glow that typically accompanied her spells, a murky haze began to form around her hands. She thrust her palms forward, sending a surge of distorted light rushing towards their assailant. The dark mage recoiled slightly but then composed himself, chuckling - a sound that seemed to crawl across their skin like centipedes skittering in darkness. He spoke then, his voice echoing unnaturally around the clearing. “You cannot fight darkness with darkness,” he taunted, “nor can you reclaim what has already been tainted.” Emeric’s response was both desperate and defiant. “We will reclaim ourselves from whatever abyss you attempt to draw us into,” he declared staunchly.

Adjusted to wielding this unfamiliar darkness within him, he began to move more confidently, his sigil now burning less like smoky shadows and more like black flames. The ambush raged on under the oppressive canopy, every clash felt less like striking at an enemy and more like grappling with their very fate. With each exchange of corrupted magics, Emeric sensed an unsettling shift in his internal balance - as if he were losing pieces of himself while gaining something else - something powerful, yet foreboding. Savi observed this change with unsettling clarity; Emeric’s features seemed sharper in the dim light, his eyes more piercing. But it wasn’t just Emeric - her own reflection in his eyes betrayed changes within herself that she feared to acknowledge: green eyes that once sparkled with life now seemed deep pools reflecting back a grim world. In a sudden surge of energy borne from desperation or perhaps newfound power, Emeric unleashed a torrential wave of black fire towards the dark mage. The mage staggered back for the first time since appearing, caught off-guard by the intensity of Emeric’s attack. Seizing the opportunity, Savi channeled all her might into one final spell. With a loud cry that merged anguish with determination, she let loose a wave of mixed energies that radiated out violently in all directions. The impact of her magic sends tremors through the ground, uprooting nearby trees and shrubs, the sheer destructive power striking awe into Emeric’s soul. In the wake of the destruction, Emeric and Savi looked on as the cloaked figure rose, shakily, clearly injured. His voice slithered through the air once more, seemingly scraping the very life out of the world around him, “you may yet understand Zartek’s true power… you harness it well, mage. And you, cleric. Your power will reach depths you never thought possible… I implore you to… experiment.” With a chuckle one more crawling under their skin, the figure disappears into the trees just as fast as he appeared.

Looking at each other once more, Emeric and Savi knew that they had not seen the last of their enemy, and certainly not the last of their corruption. Wordlessly, they exchange the knowledge that they are nowhere near powerful enough to defeat their foes, they must continue on their journey.